This book of food history, suggests that hunger and taste are the twin forces that secretly defined the course of civilization. Through war and plague, revolution and migration, people have always had to eat. What and how they ate provoked culinary upheaval around the world as ingredients were traded and fought over, and populations desperately walked the line between satiety and starvation. Parallel to the history books, a second, more obscure history...

I now pronounce you husband and wife. There are few phrases as sobering, with the possible exceptions of "We have lift-off" and "This country is at war." Yet as they have done for centuries, millions of courageous men and women continue to walk down the aisle every year, without so much as a job description. Now, in her most autobiographical book, Erma Bombeck puts it all in loving and laughing perspective, as she looks back on her own forty-three-year-but-who's-counting...

In this bold and candid memoir, music legend Billy Idol shares his life story, from his childhood in England to his rise to fame during the height of the punk pop revolution, revealing intimate details about the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that he is so fabulously famous for-all told in his own utterly indelible voice. An integral member of the punk rock revolution whose music crossed over into '80s pop mainstream--and one of MTV's first stars--Billy...

"Everybody knows and loves the American Songbook. But it's a bit less widely understood that in about 1950, this stream of great songs more or less dried up. All of a sudden, what came over the radio wasn't Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin, but "Come on-a My House" and "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" Elvis and rock and roll arrived a few years later, and at that point the game was truly up. What happened, and why? In The B Side, acclaimed cultural...

"Hip hop music is one of America's true home-grown art forms and certainly one of her most significant cultural exports, with local hip hop scenes now thriving worldwide. The birth of hip hop music is commonly dated to the release of the Sugarhill Gang's classic track "Rapper's Delight," which was the first rap song to make the Billboard Top 40 list (peaking at #36 in January 1980.) Currently, much credit goes to the Bronx for the "invention" of hip...

The definitive account of pop music in the mid-eighties, from Prince and Madonna to the underground hiphop, indie rock, and club scenes Everybody knows the hits of 1984-pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" to "Like a Virgin," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "Sister Christian" to "Love Is a Battlefield," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," they continue to dominate advertising,...